Published in German in 2018, The Sweet Indifference of the World – Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt, is Peter Stamm’s seventh novel. For a while I read almost everything he published but this one somehow passed me by until I found it among the free books in the open-air library in our neighborhood. What a lucky find. I loved this so much.
The Sweet Indifference of the World tells the story of a middle aged author, Christoph, who meets his young doppelgänger. The doppelgänger doesn’t only look like him but he seems to live the exact same life the writer lived when he was the doppelgänger’s age. The encounter is uncanny and unsettling for many reasons, especially because the doppelgänger also seems to have the exact same girlfriend, Magdalena, our writer had. Christoph never got over Magdalena or the fact that his only novel was the reason he lost her.
The book begins in Stockholm. Decades ago Christoph and Magdalena were in Stockholm together, just like his doppelgänger and his girlfriend are now. Christoph writes a note for Magdalena and asks her to meet him in the cemetery in the afternoon. He wants to tell her a story. Magdalena really meets him in the park and Christoph tells her his story. The story of his life, their love story, how he lost her, how he met his doppelgänger, and why he wanted to meet her.
Of course, she doesn’t believe him at first but she listens and they spend a lot of time together, go for a walk, go for a drink, visit a library, and other places. And they compare notes, you could say, because many details of these parallel lives are different. Christoph is called Chris, Magdalena is called, Lena. Lena and Chris are married. Chris has yet to write his novel and there are many other differences.
Stamm’s novel is about the possibility of other lives. Small events might change the course of a life but there is also the possibility to be someone else. Just like Lena, who is an actress like Magdalena, can be many people, depending on which play she’s in, a writer inhabits different worlds. Why would people in general not be able to do this? We could decide to be someone entirely different, if we wanted, the novel seems to say. But we can’t undo the past.
More than an exploration of different lives, the novel is an examination of memory. There are so many things that don’t align with what Christoph remembers that we begin to wonder whether the differences of these parallel lives aren’t rather due to distortions of Christoph’s memory. We all know how notoriously difficult it is to remember certain things and how people who were all present during an event, might remember it differently. How unsettling would it be to watch yourself living your past life and realize things might have been very different.
As you may have deduced, this isn’t a straightforward story and in the hands of another writer, it would probably have failed catastrophically. But Stamm is a master of describing small scenes and infusing them with his melancholy tone and so the story felt realistic because of its parts even though the whole was far from it.
The Sweet Indifference of the World is a beautiful novel, one of Stamm’s best, I would say. It even reminded me of some of Modiano’s novels in which memory is always a key theme. Nonetheless, if you have never read him before, I wouldn’t pick this one as your first. Rather go for one of his short story collections or the equally beautiful but straightforward novel On a Day like This which I have reviewed here.
